From Amy Thomas, author of Paris, My Sweet, a love affair with Paris, New York, sweets and travel.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Please don’t doo that

The one thing I don’t like about our offices is the bathrooms. I detest that there are no paper towels or air dryers for drying your hands, but rather those big, grody spools of cloth towels that you roll out like a mangy vertical conveyer belt. They remind me of the ’70s—when they should have been put to rest with polyester pantsuits—and make me feel so skeeved out that I want to wash my hands all over again.

I also hate that there are just two bathrooms, one for the men and one for the women. While I’m happy that men handily outnumber women in the office, the men will often use the ladies’ room. Yes, they’re marked—with those international symbols for “man” and “woman” that I needed to confirm when I first started to make sure everyone wasn’t laughing at me for using the men’s room. But this doesn’t deter the men. Nope, they’ll go into the women’s room, piss all over the floor, leave the seat up, leave the light on, and then barrel out of there like they were using a porta-potty at a Radiohead concert.

Sometimes they even drop their babies off at the pool.

Now, as far as I’m concerned going number two is something that should be done in the privacy of your own home. Unless something you ate for lunch doesn’t agree with you. Maybe I’m being prissy, but I think it’s a courtesy to your fellow colleagues not to pollute the shared bathroom. To each their own, but c’mon.

This morning, I needed to wash my water glass but both bathroom doors for the ladies’ room were closed (there is one outer door, and another floor-to-ceiling stall door). I knew some dude was in there, taking a dump, I just knew it. So I sat outside and waited. Sure enough, after a few minutes, some guy who I had never seen before came out, quickly averted his gaze, and hurried by. God, it stank. Disgusting. Then I saw this guy being lead into a meeting. So not only did he take the liberty of taking a crap in the ladies’ room, but he’s not even an employee. Can you imagine going to an office for an appointment and doing your business in the bathroom before you’ve done proper business in the conference room?? How could he not be horrified? Gawd.

I think there is something weird in the fact of not being able to dump in others WC than yours. You must be constantly restraining yourself and this is very bad for your body and your health. It also has a meaning in human psychology : you should talk to a psychanalyste, you would realize that you give importance to those details because you draw a parallel between your excrements and your money that you want to save for yourself, or because you're still in the position of the child who has been told by his mother not to dump, to restrain himself so as to please his mother. In fact, it seems very obvious that you consider the fact of dumping as an act which has to follow and not precede all others acts of human beings, as if the act of dumping was a sort of grant for having restrained yourself all the day. it's quite clear in the sentence : "Can you imagine going to an office for an appointment and doing your business in the bathroom before you've done proper business in the conference room ?" In fact, the behaviour of the man is more mature than yours because he doesn't use his natural functions as a grant for having done his job : on the contrary, he satisfies the natural needs of his body to work better after, and he is quite able to make a difference between the two acts, while you consider dumping as a shame, something you do on your home, after restraining yourself all the day and working hard.You should talk to somebody